Contents
Cover Title Page Copyright
From a Conversation with a Historian A Human Being Is Greater Than War
“I Don’t Want to Remember…”
“Grow Up, Girls…You’re Still Green…”
“I Alone Came Back to Mama…”
“Two Wars Live in Our House…”
“Telephones Don’t Shoot…”
“They Awarded Us Little Medals…”
“It Wasn’t Me…”
“I Remember Those Eyes Even Now…”
“We Didn’t Shoot…”
“They Needed Soldiers…but We Also Wanted to Be Beautiful…”
“Young Ladies! Do You Know: The Commander of a Sapper Platoon Lives Only Two Months…”
“To See Him Just Once…”
“About Tiny Potatoes…”
“Mama, What’s a Papa?”
“And She Puts Her Hand to Her Heart…”
“Suddenly We Wanted Desperately to Live…”
By Svetlana Alexievich About the Author About the Translators
—At what time in history did women first appear in the army?
—Already in the fourth century B.C. women fought in the Greek armies of Athens and Sparta. Later they took part in the campaigns of Alexander the Great.
The Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin* wrote about our ancestors: “Slavic women occasionally went to war with their fathers and husbands, not fearing death: thus during the siege of Constantinople in 626 the Greeks found many female bodies among the dead Slavs. A mother, raising her children, prepared them to be warriors.”
—And in modern times?
—For the first time in England, where from 1560 to 1650 they began to staff hospitals with women soldiers.
—What happened in the twentieth century?
—The beginning of the century…In England during World War I women were already being taken into the Royal Air Force. A Royal Auxiliary Corps was also formed and the Women’s Legion of Motor Transport, which numbered 100,000 persons.
In Russia, Germany, and France many women went to serve in military hospitals and ambulance trains.
During World War II the world was witness to a women’s phenomenon. Women served in all branches of the military in many countries of the world: 225,000 in the British army, 450,000 to 500,000 in the American, 500,000 in the German…
About a million women fought in the Soviet army. They mastered all military specialties, including the most “masculine” ones. A linguistic problem even emerged: no feminine gender had existed till then for the words “tank driver,” “infantryman,” “machine gunner,”
because women had never done that work. The feminine forms were born there, in the war…
* The Russian poet and writer Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826) was the author of a masterful twelve-volume History of the Russian State.
Millions of the cheaply killed Have trod the path in darkness…
—OSIP MANDELSTAM*1
FROM THE JOURNAL OF THIS BOOK 1978–1985
I am writing a book about war…
I, who never liked to read military books, although in my childhood and youth this was the favorite reading of everybody. Of all my peers. And that is not surprising—we were the children of Victory. The children of the victors. What is the first thing I remember about the war? My childhood anguish amid the incomprehensible and frightening words. The war was remembered all the time:
at school and at home, at weddings and christenings, at celebrations and wakes.
Even in children’s conversations. The neighbors’ boy once asked me: “What do people do under the ground? How do they live there?” We, too, wanted to unravel the mystery of war.
It was then that I began to think about death…And I never stopped thinking about it; it became the main mystery of life for me.
For us everything took its origin from that frightening and mysterious world. In our family my Ukrainian grandfather, my mother’s father, was killed at the front and is buried somewhere in Hungary, and my Belorussian grandmother, my
father’s mother, was a partisan*2 and died of typhus; two of her sons served in the army and were reported missing in the first months of the war; of three sons only one came back. My father. The Germans burned alive eleven distant relations with their children—some in their cottage, some in a village church. These things happened in every family. With everybody.
For a long time afterward the village boys played “Germans and Russians.”
They shouted German words: Hände hoch! Zurück! Hitler kaputt!
We didn’t know a world without war; the world of war was the only one familiar to us, and the people of war were the only people we knew. Even now I don’t know any other world and any other people. Did they ever exist?
—
THE VILLAGE OF MY postwar childhood was a village of women. Village women. I don’t remember any men’s voices. That is how it has remained for me: stories of the war are told by women. They weep. Their songs are like weeping.
In the school library half of the books were about the war. The same with the village library, and in the nearby town, where my father often drove to get books.
Now I know the reason why. Could it have been accidental? We were making war all the time, or preparing for war. Remembering how we made war. We never lived any other way, and probably didn’t know how. We can’t imagine how to live differently, and it will take us a long time to learn, if we ever do.
At school we were taught to love death. We wrote compositions about how we would like to die in the name of…We dreamed…
But the voices outside shouted about other more alluring things.
For a long time I was a bookish person, both frightened and attracted by reality. My fearlessness came from an ignorance of life. Now I think: If I were a more realistic person, could I throw myself into that abyss? What caused it all—
ignorance? Or the sense of a path? For the sense of a path does exist…
I searched for a long time…What words can convey what I hear? I searched for a genre that would correspond to how I see the world, how my eye, my ear, are organized.
Once a book fell into my hands: I Am from a Burning Village, by A.
Adamovich, Ya. Bryl, and V. Kolesnik.*3 I had experienced such a shock only once before, when I read Dostoevsky. Here was an unusual form: the novel was composed from the voices of life itself, from what I had heard in childhood, from
what can be heard now in the street, at home, in a café, on a bus. There! The circle was closed. I had found what I was looking for. I knew I would.
Ales Adamovich became my teacher…
—
FOR TWO YEARS I was not so much meeting and writing as thinking. Reading.
What will my book be about? Yet another book about war? What for? There have been a thousand wars—small and big, known and unknown. And still more has been written about them. But…it was men writing about men—that much was clear at once. Everything we know about war we know with “a man’s voice.” We are all captives of “men’s” notions and “men’s” sense of war. “Men’s” words.
Women are silent. No one but me ever questioned my grandmother. My mother.
Even those who were at the front say nothing. If they suddenly begin to remember, they don’t talk about the “women’s” war but about the “men’s.” They tune in to the canon. And only at home or waxing tearful among their combat girlfriends do they begin to talk about their war, the war unknown to me. Not only to me, to all of us. More than once during my journalistic travels I witnessed, I was the only hearer of, totally new texts. I was shaken as I had been in childhood. The monstrous grin of the mysterious shows through these stories…
When women speak, they have nothing or almost nothing of what we are used to reading and hearing about: How certain people heroically killed other people and won. Or lost. What equipment there was and which generals. Women’s stories are different and about different things. “Women’s” war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. Its own words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things. And it is not only they (people!) who suffer, but the earth, the birds, the trees. All that lives on earth with us. They suffer without words, which is still more frightening.
But why? I asked myself more than once. Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? They did not believe themselves. A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown…
I want to write the history of that war. A women’s history.
—
AFTER THE FIRST ENCOUNTERS…
Astonishment: these women’s military professions—medical assistant, sniper, machine gunner, commander of an antiaircraft gun, sapper—and now they are accountants, lab technicians, museum guides, teachers…Discrepancy of the roles
—here and there. Their memories are as if not about themselves, but some other girls. Now they are surprised at themselves. Before my eyes history “humanizes”
itself, becomes like ordinary life. Acquires a different lighting.
I’ve happened upon extraordinary storytellers. There are pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. The person sees herself so clearly from above—from heaven, and from below—from the ground. Before her is the whole path—up and down—from angel to beast. Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all it is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they “write” their life. Sometimes they also “write up” or “rewrite.”
Here you have to be vigilant. On your guard. At the same time pain melts and destroys any falsehood. The temperature is too high! Simple people—nurses, cooks, laundresses—behave more sincerely, I became convinced of that…They, how shall I put it exactly, draw the words out of themselves and not from newspapers and books they have read—not from others. But only from their own sufferings and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be, are often more subject to the working of time. Its general encrypting. They are infected by secondary knowledge. By myths. Often I have to go for a long time, by various roundabout ways, in order to hear a story of a
“woman’s,” not a “man’s” war: not about how we retreated, how we advanced, at which sector of the front…It takes not one meeting, but many sessions. Like a persistent portrait painter.
I sit for a long time, sometimes a whole day, in an unknown house or apartment. We drink tea, try on the recently bought blouses, discuss hairstyles and recipes. Look at photos of the grandchildren together. And then…After a certain time, you never know when or why, suddenly comes this long-awaited moment, when the person departs from the canon—plaster and reinforced concrete, like our monuments—and goes on to herself. Into herself. Begins to remember not the war but her youth. A piece of her life…I must seize that moment. Not miss it!
But often, after a long day, filled with words, facts, tears, only one phrase remains in my memory (but what a phrase!): “I was so young when I left for the front, I even grew during the war.” I keep it in my notebook, although I have dozens of yards of tape in my tape recorder. Four or five cassettes…
What helps me? That we are used to living together. Communally. We are communal people. With us everything is in common—both happiness and tears.
We know how to suffer and how to tell about our suffering. Suffering justifies our hard and ungainly life. For us pain is art. I must admit, women boldly set out on this path…
— HOW DO THEY RECEIVE ME?
They call me “little girl,” “dear daughter,” “dear child.” Probably if I was of their generation they would behave differently with me. Calmly and as equals.
Without joy and amazement, which are the gifts of the meeting between youth and age. It is a very important point, that then they were young and now, as they remember, they are old. They remember across their life—across forty years.
They open their world to me cautiously, to spare me: “I got married right after the war. I hid behind my husband. Behind the humdrum, behind baby diapers. I wanted to hide. My mother also begged: ‘Be quiet! Be quiet! Don’t tell.’ I fulfilled my duty to the Motherland, but it makes me sad that I was there. That I know about it…And you are very young. I feel sorry for you…” I often see how they sit and listen to themselves. To the sound of their own soul. They check it against the words. After long years a person understands that this was life, but now it’s time to resign yourself and get ready to go. You don’t want to, and it’s too bad to vanish just like that. Casually. In passing. And when you look back you feel a wish not only to tell about your life, but also to fathom the mystery of life itself.
To answer your own question: Why did all this happen to me? You gaze at everything with a parting and slightly sorrowful look…Almost from the other side…No longer any need to deceive anyone or yourself. It’s already clear to you that without the thought of death it is impossible to make out anything in a human being. Its mystery hangs over everything.
War is an all too intimate experience. And as boundless as human life…
Once a woman (a pilot) refused to meet with me. She explained on the phone:
“I can’t…I don’t want to remember. I spent three years at war…And for three years I didn’t feel myself a woman. My organism was dead. I had no periods, almost no woman’s desires. And I was beautiful…When my future husband proposed to me…that was already in Berlin, by the Reichstag…He said: ‘The war’s over. We’re still alive. We’re lucky. Let’s get married.’ I wanted to cry. To shout. To hit him! What do you mean, married? Now? In the midst of all this—
married? In the midst of black soot and black bricks…Look at me…Look how I am! Begin by making me a woman: give me flowers, court me, say beautiful words. I want it so much! I wait for it! I almost hit him…I was about to…He had one cheek burned, purple, and I see: he understood everything, tears are running down that cheek. On the still-fresh scars…And I myself can’t believe I’m saying to him: ‘Yes, I’ll marry you.’
“Forgive me…I can’t…”
I understood her. But this was also a page or half a page of my future book.
Texts, texts. Texts everywhere. In city apartments and village cottages, in the streets and on the train…I listen…I turn more and more into a big ear, listening all the time to another person. I “read” voices.
— A HUMAN BEING IS greater than war…
Memory preserves precisely the moments of that greatness. A human being is guided by something stronger than history. I have to gain breadth—to write the truth about life and death in general, not only the truth about war. To ask Dostoevsky’s question: How much human being is in a human being, and how to protect this human being in oneself? Evil is unquestionably tempting. Evil is more artful than good. More attractive. As I delve more deeply into the boundless world of war, everything else becomes slightly faded, more ordinary than the ordinary. A grandiose and predatory world. Now I understand the solitude of the human being who comes back from there. As if from another planet or from the other world. This human being has a knowledge that others do not have, that can be obtained only there, close to death. When she tries to put something into words, she has a sense of catastrophe. She is struck dumb. She wants to tell, the others would like to understand, but they are all powerless.
They are always in a different space than the listener. They are surrounded by an invisible world. At least three persons participate in the conversation: the one who is talking now, the one she was then, at the moment of the event, and myself.
My goal first of all is to get at the truth of those years. Of those days. Without sham feelings. Just after the war this woman would have told of one war; after decades, of course, it changes somewhat, because she adds her whole life to this memory. Her whole self. How she lived those years, what she read, saw, whom she met. Finally, whether she is happy or unhappy. Do we talk by ourselves, or is someone else there? Family? If it’s friends, what sort? Friends from the front are
one thing, all the rest are another. My documents are living beings; they change and fluctuate together with us; there is no end of things to be gotten out of them.
Something new and necessary for us precisely now. This very moment. What are we looking for? Most often not great deeds and heroism, but small, human things, the most interesting and intimate for us. Well, what would I like most to know, for instance, from the life of ancient Greece? From the history of Sparta? I would like to read how people talked at home then and what they talked about. How they went to war. What words they spoke on the last day and the last night before parting with their loved ones. How they saw them off to war. How they awaited their return from war…Not heroes or generals, but ordinary young men…
History through the story told by an unnoticed witness and participant. Yes, that interests me, that I would like to make into literature. But the narrators are not only witnesses—least of all are they witnesses; they are actors and makers. It is impossible to go right up to reality. Between us and reality are our feelings. I understand that I am dealing with versions, that each person has her version, and it is from them, from their plurality and their intersections, that the image of the time and the people living in it is born. But I would not like it to be said of my book: her heroes are real, and no more than that. This is just history. Mere history.
I write not about war, but about human beings in war. I write not the history of a war, but the history of feelings. I am a historian of the soul. On the one hand I examine specific human beings, living in a specific time and taking part in specific events, and on the other hand I have to discern the eternally human in them. The tremor of eternity. That which is in human beings at all times.
They say to me: Well, memories are neither history nor literature. They’re simply life, full of rubbish and not tidied up by the hand of an artist. The raw material of talk, every day is filled with it. These bricks lie about everywhere. But bricks don’t make a temple! For me it is all different…It is precisely there, in the warm human voice, in the living reflection of the past, that the primordial joy is concealed and the insurmountable tragedy of life is laid bare. Its chaos and passion. Its uniqueness and inscrutability. Not yet subjected to any treatment. The originals.
I build temples out of our feelings…Out of our desires, our disappointments.
Dreams. Out of that which was, but might slip away.
—
ONCE AGAIN ABOUT THE same thing…I’m interested not only in the reality that surrounds us, but in the one that is within us. I’m interested not in the event itself, but in the event of feelings. Let’s say—the soul of the event. For me feelings are reality.
And history? It is in the street. In the crowd. I believe that in each of us there is a small piece of history. In one half a page, in another two or three. Together we write the book of time. We each call out our truth. The nightmare of nuances.
And it all has to be heard, and one has to dissolve in it all, and become it all. And at the same time not lose oneself. To combine the language of the street and literature. The problem is also that we speak about the past in present-day language. How can we convey the feelings of those days?
—
A PHONE CALL IN the morning: “We’re not acquainted…But I’ve come from Crimea, I’m calling from the train station. Is it far from you? I want to tell you my war…”
Really?!
And I was about to go to the park with my little girl. To ride the merry-go- round. How can I explain to a six-year-old what it is I do? She recently asked me:
“What is war?” How do I reply?…I would like to send her out into this world with a gentle heart, and I teach her that one shouldn’t simply go and pick a flower.
It’s a pity to crush a ladybug, to tear the wing off a dragonfly. So how am I to explain war to the child? To explain death? To answer the question of why people kill? Kill even little children like herself. We, the adults, are as if in collusion. We understand what the talk is about. But what of children? After the war my parents somehow explained it to me, but I can’t explain it to my child. Can’t find the words. We like war less and less; it’s more and more difficult to find a justification for it. For us it’s simply murder. At least it is for me.
I would like to write a book about war that would make war sickening, and the very thought of it repulsive. Insane. So that even the generals would be sickened…
My men friends (as opposed to women) are taken aback by such “women’s”
logic. And again I hear the “men’s” argument: “You weren’t in the war.” But maybe that’s a good thing: I don’t know the passion of hatred; my vision is normal. Unwarlike, unmanly.
There is a concept in optics called “light-gathering power”—the greater or lesser ability of a lens to fix the caught image. So, then, women’s memory of the war is the most “light-gathering” in terms of strength of feelings, in terms of pain.
I would even say that “women’s” war is more terrible than “men’s.” Men hide behind history, behind facts; war fascinates them as action and a conflict of ideas, of interests, whereas women are caught up with feelings. And another thing: men are prepared from childhood for the fact that they may have to shoot. Women are not taught that…They are not prepared to do that work…And they remember other things, and remember differently. They are capable of seeing what is closed to men. I repeat once more: their war has smell, has color, a detailed world of existence: “They gave us kit bags and we made skirts out of them”; “I went into the recruiting office through one door wearing a dress, and came out through the other wearing trousers and an army shirt, with my braid cut off, and only a little lock left on my forehead…”; “The Germans gunned down the village and left…
We came to the place: trampled yellow sand, and on top of it one child’s shoe…”
I had been warned more than once (especially by male writers): “Women are going to invent a pile of things for you. All sorts of fiction.” But I’m convinced that such things cannot be invented. Who could they be copied from? If that can be copied, it’s only from life; life alone has such fantasy.
Whatever women talk about, the thought is constantly present in them: war is first of all murder, and then hard work. And then simply ordinary life: singing, falling in love, putting your hair in curlers…
In the center there is always this: how unbearable and unthinkable it is to die.
And how much more unbearable and unthinkable it is to kill, because a woman gives life. Gives it. Bears it in herself for a long time, nurses it. I understood that it is more difficult for women to kill.
—
MEN…They reluctantly let women into their world, onto their territory.
At the Minsk tractor factory I was looking for a woman who had served in the army as a sniper. She had been a famous sniper. The newspapers from the front had written about her more than once. Her Moscow girlfriends gave me her home phone number, but it was old. And the last name I had noted down was her maiden name. I went to the factory where I knew she worked in the personnel department, and I heard from the men (the director of the factory and the head of the personnel department): “Aren’t there enough men? What do you need these
women’s stories for? Women’s fantasies…” The men were afraid that women would tell about some wrong sort of war.
I visited a family…Both husband and wife had fought. They met at the front and got married there: “We celebrated our wedding in the trench. Before the battle. I made a white dress for myself out of a German parachute.” He had been a machine gunner, she a radio operator. The man immediately sent his wife to the kitchen: “Prepare something for us.” The kettle was already boiling, and the sandwiches were served, she sat down with us, but the husband immediately got her to her feet again: “Where are the strawberries? Where are our treats from the country?” After my repeated requests, he reluctantly relinquished his place, saying: “Tell it the way I taught you. Without tears and women’s trifles: how you wanted to be beautiful, how you wept when they cut off your braid.” Later she whispered to me: “He studied The History of the Great Patriotic War with me all last night. He was afraid for me. And now he’s worried I won’t remember right.
Not the way I should.”
That happened more than once, in more than one house.
Yes, they cry a lot. They shout. Swallow heart pills after I am gone. Call an ambulance. But even so they beg me: “Come. Be sure to come. We’ve been silent so long. Forty years…”
I realize that tears and cries cannot be subjected to processing, otherwise the main thing will be not the tears and cries, but the processing. Instead of life we’re left with literature. Such is the material, the temperature of this material.
Permanently off the charts. A human being is most visible and open in war, and maybe also in love. To the depths, to the subcutaneous layers. In the face of death all ideas pale, and inconceivable eternity opens up, for which no one is prepared.
We still live in history, not in the cosmos.
Several times women sent back my transcribed text with a postscript: “No need for small details…Write about our great Victory…” But “small details” are what is most important for me, the warmth and vividness of life: a lock left on the forehead once the braid is cut; the hot kettles of kasha and soup, which no one eats, because out of a hundred persons only seven came back from the battle; or how after the war they could not go to the market and look at the rows of red meat…Or even at red cloth…“Ah, my good girl, forty years have already gone by, but you won’t find anything red in my house. Ever since the war I’ve hated the color red!”
—
—
I LISTEN TO THE pain…Pain as the proof of past life. There are no other proofs, I don’t trust other proofs. Words have more than once led us away from the truth.
I think of suffering as the highest form of information, having a direct connection with mystery. With the mystery of life. All of Russian literature is about that. It has written more about suffering than about love.
And these women tell me more about it…
—
WHO WERE THEY—RUSSIANS OR Soviets? No, they were Soviets—and Russians, and Belorussians, and Ukrainians, and Tajiks…
Yet there was such a thing as Soviet people. I don’t think such people will ever exist again, and they themselves now understand that. Even we, their children, are different. We want to be like everybody else. Not like our parents, but like the rest of the world. To say nothing of the grandchildren…
But I love them. I admire them. They had Stalin and the Gulag,*4 but they also had the Victory. And they know that.
I received a letter recently: “My daughter loves me very much; I am a heroine for her. If she reads your book, she will be greatly disappointed. Filth, lice, endless blood—that’s all true. I don’t deny it. But can the memory of it possibly engender noble feelings? Prepare one for a great deed…?”
More than once I’ve realized:
…our memory is far from an ideal instrument. It is not only arbitrary and capricious, it is also chained to time, like a dog.
…we look at the past from today; we cannot look at it from anywhere else.
…they, too, are in love with what happened to them, because it is not only war, but also their youth. Their first love.
—
I LISTEN WHEN THEY speak…I listen when they are silent…Both words and silence are the text for me.
—
—This isn’t for print, it’s for you…The older people…they sat on the train deep in thought…Sad. I remember how one major began talking to me during the night, when everybody was asleep, about Stalin. He had drunk a lot and became bold; he confessed that his father had already spent ten years in the camps without the right of correspondence.*5 Whether he was alive or not, no one knew.
This major spoke terrible words: “I want to defend the Motherland, but I don’t want to defend that traitor of the revolution—Stalin.” I had never heard such words…I was frightened. Fortunately, by morning he disappeared. Probably got off…
—
—I’ll tell you in secret…I was friends with Oksana, she was from Ukraine. It was from her that I first heard of the horrible hunger in Ukraine. Golodomor.*6 You couldn’t even find a frog or a mouse—everything had been eaten. Half the people in her settlement died. All her younger brothers, her father and mother died, but she saved herself by stealing horse dung at the kolkhoz*7 stable by night and eating it. Nobody could eat it, but she did: “When it’s warm it’s disgusting, but you can eat it cold. Frozen is the best, it smells of hay.” I said, “Oksana, Comrade Stalin is fighting. He destroys the saboteurs, but there are many.” “No,” she said,
“you’re stupid. My father was a history teacher, he said to me, ‘Someday Comrade Stalin will answer for his crimes…’ ”
At night I lay there and thought: What if Oksana is the enemy? A spy? What am I to do? Two days later she was killed in combat. She had no family left, there was no one to send the death notice to…
—
I touch upon this subject carefully and rarely. They are still paralyzed not only by Stalin’s hypnosis and fear, but also by their former faith. They cannot stop loving what they used to love. Courage in war and courage of thought are two different courages. I used to think they were the same.
—
THE MANUSCRIPT HAS BEEN lying on the desk for a long time…
For two years now I’ve been getting rejections from publishers. Magazines
don’t reply. The verdict is always the same: war is too terrible. So much horror.
Naturalism. No leading and guiding role of the Communist Party. In short, not the right kind of war…What is the right kind? With generals and a wise generalissimo? Without blood and lice? With heroes and great deeds? But I remember from childhood: my grandmother and I are walking beside a big field, and she tells me: “After the war nothing grew in this field for a long time. The Germans were retreating…And there was a battle here, it went on for two days…
The dead lay next to each other like sheaves. Like railroad ties. The Germans’ and ours. After rain they all had tear-stained faces. Our whole village spent a month burying them.”
How can I forget that field?
I don’t simply record. I collect, I track down the human spirit wherever suffering makes a small man into a great man. Wherever a man grows. And then for me he is no longer the mute and traceless proletarian of history. With a torn- off soul. What then is my conflict with the authorities? I understood—a great idea needs a small human being, not a great one. A great one is superfluous and inconvenient for it. Hard to process. And I look for them. I look for small great human beings. Humiliated, trampled upon, insulted—having gone through Stalin’s camps and treachery, these human beings came out victorious. They performed a miracle.
But the history of the war had been replaced by the history of the victory.
They themselves will tell about it…
SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER 2002–2004
— I’M READING MY OLD journal…
I’m trying to remember the person I was when I was writing this book. That person is no more, just as the country in which we then lived is no more. Yet it is that country that had been defended and in whose name people had died in the years ’41 to ’45. Outside the window everything is different: a new millennium, new wars, new ideas, new weapons, and the Russian (more exactly, Russian-
Soviet) man changed in a totally unexpected way.
Gorbachev’s perestroika began…*8 My book was published at once, in an astonishing printing—two million copies. This was a time when many startling things were happening, when we again furiously tore off somewhere. Again into the future. We still did not know (or else forgot) that revolution is always an illusion, especially in our history. But that would come later, and at the time everybody was drunk with the air of freedom. I began to receive dozens of letters daily, my folders were swelling. People wanted to talk…to finish talking…They became more free and more open. I had no doubt that I was doomed to go on writing my books endlessly. Not rewriting, but writing. A full stop immediately turns into an ellipsis…
—
I THINK THAT TODAY I would probably ask different questions and hear different answers. And would write a different book—not entirely different, but still different. The documents (the ones I deal with) are living witnesses; they don’t harden like cooled clay. They don’t grow mute. They move together with us.
What would I ask more about now? What would I like to add? I would be interested in…I’m hunting for the word…the biological human being, not just the human being of time and ideas. I would try to delve deeper into human nature, into the darkness, into the subconscious. Into the mystery of war.
I would write about my visit to a former partisan fighter. A heavyset but still beautiful woman. She told me how her group (she was the oldest, plus two adolescents) went on a scouting mission and accidentally captured four Germans.
They circled about in the forest with them for a long time. Ran into an ambush. It became clear that they would not be able to break through with the captives and get away, and she made a decision—to dispose of them. The adolescents would not have been able to kill them; they had been wandering together in the forest for a few days, and when you spend that much time with a person, even a stranger, you get used to him, he becomes close—you know how he eats, how he sleeps, what kind of eyes and hands he has. No, the adolescents couldn’t do it.
That became clear to her at once. So she had to kill them. She recalled how she did it. She had to deceive her own people and the Germans. She supposedly went to fetch water with one German and shot him from behind. In the head. She took another to gather brushwood…I was shocked to hear her tell it so calmly.
Those who were in the war remember that it took three days for a civilian to
turn into a military man. Why are three days enough? Or is that also a myth?
Most likely. A human being in war is all the more unfamiliar and incomprehensible.
I read in all the letters: “I didn’t tell you everything then, because it was a different time. We were used to keeping quiet about many things…” “I didn’t confide everything to you. Not long ago it was impossible to speak about it. Or embarrassing.” “I know the doctors’ verdict: my diagnosis is terrible…I want to tell the whole truth…”
And recently this letter came: “For us old people life is hard…But not because our pensions are small and humiliating. What wounds us most of all is that we have been driven from a great past into an unbearably small present. No one invites us anymore to appear at schools, in museums, we are not needed anymore.
In the newspapers, if you read them, the fascists become more and more noble, and the Red soldiers become more and more terrible.”
Time is also the Motherland…But I love them as before. I don’t love their time, but I do love them.
— EVERYTHING CAN BECOME LITERATURE…
In my archives I was interested most of all in the notebooks where I wrote down the episodes crossed out by the censors. And my conversations with the censors as well. I also found there pages that I had thrown out myself. My self- censorship, my own ban. And my explanation—why I had thrown them out.
Many of these and other things have been restored in the book, but I would like to give these few pages separately—they also make a document. My path.
FROM WHAT THE CENSORS THREW OUT
—I just woke up in the night…It’s as if somebody’s…crying nearby…I’m at the front…
We’re retreating…Beyond Smolensk some woman gives me her dress, and I manage to change my clothes. I’m alone…among men. I was wearing trousers, but now I march in a summer dress. Suddenly I begin to have my…woman’s thing…It started early, probably from the agitation. From being nervous, upset.
There was nowhere to find what I needed. I was embarrassed! So embarrassed!
People slept under bushes, in ditches, on stumps in the forest. There were so many of us, there was no room in the forest for everybody. We went on bewildered, deceived, trusting nobody anymore…Where was our air force, where were our tanks? Everything that flew, drove, rumbled—was all German.
In that state I was captured. On the last day before I was captured, both of my legs got broken…I lay there and peed under myself…I don’t know where I found strength to crawl away by night to the forest…The partisans chanced to pick me up.
I’m sorry for those who will read this book, and for those who won’t…
—
—I was on night duty…Went to the ward of the badly wounded. There was a captain there…The doctors warned me before I started my shift that he would die during the night. Wouldn’t make it till morning…I ask him: “How are things?
Anything I can do for you?” I’ll never forget it…He suddenly smiled, such a bright smile on his haggard face: “Unbutton your coat…Show me your breast…I haven’t seen my wife for so long…” I was totally at a loss, I’d never even been kissed before. I gave him some answer. I ran away and came back an hour later.
He lay dead. And still had that smile on his face…
—
—Near Kerch…We went on a barge at night under shelling. The bow caught fire…The fire crept along the deck. Our store of ammunition exploded…a powerful explosion! So violent that the barge tilted on the right side and began to sink. The bank wasn’t far away, we knew the bank was somewhere close by, and the soldiers threw themselves into the water. There was machine-gun fire from the bank. Shouts, moans, curses…I was a good swimmer, I wanted to save at least one of them. At least one wounded man…This was in the water, not on dry land
—a wounded man perishes at once. Goes to the bottom…I heard somebody next to me come up to the surface, then sink down again. Up—then down. I seized the moment and grabbed hold of him…Something cold, slimy…I decided it was a wounded man, and his clothes had been torn off by the explosion. Because I was naked myself…Just in my underwear…Pitch dark. Around me: “Ohh! Aiie!” and curses…I somehow made it to the bank with him…Just then there was the flash of a rocket, and I saw that I was holding a big wounded fish. A big fish, the size
of a man. A white sturgeon…It was dying…I fell down beside it and ripped out some sort of well-rounded curse. I wept from rancor…And from the fact that everybody was suffering…
—
—We were trying to get out of an encirclement…Wherever we went, there were Germans. We decided that in the morning we would fight our way through. We were going to die anyway, it was better to die with dignity. In combat. There were three girls with us. They came during the night to each of us who could…Of course, not everybody was able to. Nerves, you understand. That sort of thing…
Each of us was preparing to die…
A few of us survived till morning…Very few…Well, maybe seven men, and we had been fifty, if not more. The Germans cut us down with machine-gun fire…I remember those girls with gratitude. In the morning I didn’t find a one of them among the living…Never ran into them again…
FROM A CONVERSATION WITH THE CENSOR
—Who will go to fight after such books? You humiliate women with a primitive naturalism. Heroic women. You dethrone them. You make them into ordinary women, females. But our women are saints.
—Our heroism is sterile, it leaves no room for physiology or biology. It’s not believable. War tested not only the spirit but the body, too. The material shell.
—Where did you get such thoughts? Alien thoughts. Not Soviet. You laugh at those who lie in communal graves. You’ve read too much Remarque…*9 Remarquism won’t get you anywhere with us. A Soviet woman is not an animal…
—Somebody betrayed us…The Germans found out where the camp of our partisan unit was. They cordoned off the forest and the approaches to it on all sides. We hid in the wild thickets, we were saved by the swamps where the punitive forces didn’t go. A quagmire. It sucked in equipment and people for good. For days, for weeks, we stood up to our necks in water. Our radio operator was a woman who had recently given birth. The baby was hungry…It had to be nursed…But the mother herself was hungry and had no milk. The baby cried. The punitive forces were close…With dogs…If the dogs heard it, we’d all be killed.
The whole group—thirty of us…You understand?
The commander makes a decision…
Nobody can bring himself to give the mother his order, but she figures it out herself. She lowers the swaddled baby into the water and holds it there for a long time…The baby doesn’t cry anymore…Not a sound…And we can’t raise our eyes. Neither to the mother nor to each other…
—
—We took prisoners, brought them to the detachment…We didn’t shoot them, that was too easy a death for them; we stuck them with ramrods like pigs, we cut them to pieces. I went to look at it…I waited! I waited a long time for the moment when their eyes would begin to burst from pain…The pupils…
What do you know about it?! They burned my mother and little sisters on a bonfire in the middle of our village…
—
—I don’t remember any cats or dogs during the war, I remember rats. Big…with yellow-blue eyes…There were huge numbers of them. When I recovered from a wound, I was sent back to my unit from the hospital. The unit was stationed in the trenches near Stalingrad. The commander ordered: “Take her to the girls’
dugout.” I entered the dugout and first of all was surprised that there was nothing in it. Empty beds of fir branches and that’s all. They didn’t warn me…I left my knapsack in the dugout and stepped out. When I came back half an hour later I didn’t find my knapsack. Not a trace of anything, no hair comb, no pencil. It turned out the rats instantly devoured everything…
In the morning they showed me the gnawed hands of the badly wounded…
Not even in the most horrible film did I see how the rats leave before the bombing of a town. This wasn’t at Stalingrad…This was already near Vyazma…
In the morning swarms of rats went through the town, heading for the fields.
They sensed death. There were thousands of them…Black, gray…People watched this sinister spectacle in horror and pressed against the houses. And precisely at the moment when the rats disappeared from sight, the bombing began. Planes came flying. Instead of houses and basements only rubble was left…
—
—There were so many people killed at Stalingrad that horses stopped being afraid. Usually they’re afraid of the dead. A horse will never step on a dead man.
We gathered our own dead, but there were Germans lying about everywhere.
Frozen…Icy…I was a driver, I transported crates of artillery shells, I heard their skulls crack under the wheels…the bones…And I was happy…
FROM A CONVERSATION WITH THE CENSOR
—Yes, we paid heavily for the Victory, but you should look for heroic examples.
There are hundreds of them. And you show the filth of the war. The underwear.
You make our Victory terrible…What is it you’re after?
—The truth.
—You think the truth is what’s there in life. In the street. Under your feet. It’s such a low thing for you. Earthly. No, the truth is what we dream about. It’s how we want to be!
—We advance…The first German villages…We’re young. Strong. Four years without women. There’s wine in the cellars. Food. We’d catch German girls and…Ten men violated one girl…There weren’t enough women, the population fled before the Soviet army, we found very young ones. Twelve or thirteen years old…If she cried, we’d beat her, stuff something into her mouth. It was painful for her, but funny for us. Now I don’t understand how I could…A boy from a cultivated family…But I did it…
The only thing we were afraid of was that our own girls would find out about it. Our nurses. We were ashamed before them…
—
—We were encircled…We wandered in the forests, over the swamps. Ate leaves, tree bark. Some sort of roots. There were five of us, one a very young boy, just called up for the army. At night my neighbor whispers to me: “The boy’s half dead, he’ll die anyway. You get me…” “What do you mean?” “An ex-convict once told me…When they escaped from the labor camp, they purposely took a young man with them…Human flesh is edible…That’s how they stayed alive…”
I didn’t have strength enough to hit him. The next day we ran into some partisans…
—
—
—In the afternoon the partisans rode into the village on horseback. They led the village headman and his son out of their house. They beat them on the head with iron rods till they fell down. And finished them off on the ground. I sat by the window. I saw everything…My older brother was among the partisans…When he came into our house and wanted to embrace me—“Sister dear!”—I shouted:
“Don’t come near me! Don’t come near me! You’re a murderer!” Then I went dumb. Couldn’t speak for a month.
My brother was killed…What would have happened if he had stayed alive?
And come back home…
—
—In the morning the punitive forces set fire to our village…Only those who fled to the forest survived. They fled with nothing, empty-handed, didn’t take even bread. No eggs or lard. During the night Aunt Nastya, our neighbor, beat her daughter because she cried all the time. Aunt Nastya had her five children with her. Yulechka, my friend, was the weakest. She was always sick…And the four boys, all of them little, also asked to eat all the time. And Aunt Nastya went crazy: “Ooo…Ooo…” And in the night I heard…Yulechka begged, “Mama, don’t drown me. I won’t…I won’t ask to eat anymore. I won’t…”
In the morning there was no Yulechka to be seen…
Aunt Nastya…We went back to the embers of the village…It had burned down. Soon Aunt Nastya hanged herself from the charred apple tree in her garden. She hung very, very low. Her children stood around her asking to eat…
FROM A CONVERSATION WITH THE CENSOR
—This is a lie! This is slander against our soldiers, who liberated half of Europe.
Against our partisans. Against our heroic people. We don’t need your little history, we need the big history. The history of the Victory. You don’t love our heroes! You don’t love our great ideas. The ideas of Marx and Lenin.
—True, I don’t love great ideas. I love the little human being…
FROM WHAT I THREW OUT MYSELF
—1941…We were encircled. With our political instructor, Lunin…He read us the order, that Soviet soldiers do not surrender to the enemy. With us, as Comrade Stalin said, there are no prisoners, there are only traitors. The boys drew their pistols…The political instructor ordered: “Don’t. Go on living, boys, you’re young.” And he shot himself…
And now it’s 1943…The Soviet army is advancing. We’re moving through Belorussia. I remember a little boy. He ran out to us from somewhere under the ground, some basement, and shouted, “Kill my mama…Kill her! She loved a German…” His eyes were round from fear. An old woman in black ran after him.
All in black. She was running and crossing herself: “Don’t listen to the child. The child’s gone crazy…”
—
—I was summoned to school…A teacher who had just returned from evacuation talked to me:
“I want to transfer your son to another class. In my class I have the best pupils.”
“But my son has high grades.”
“That doesn’t matter. The boy lived under the Germans.”
“Yes, it was hard for us.”
“That’s not the point. All those who were in occupied territories…They are under suspicion…”
“What? I don’t understand…”
“He tells other children about the Germans. And he stutters.”
“That’s because he was frightened. The German officer who was billeted with us gave him a beating. He didn’t like how my son polished his boots.”
“You see…You yourself admit…You lived alongside the enemy…”
“And who let that enemy get as far as Moscow? Who left us here with our children?”
I was in hysterics…
For two days I was afraid the teacher would denounce me. But she kept my son in her class…
—
—During the day we were afraid of the Germans and the polizei*10 and during the night of the partisans. The partisans took my last cow, I had only a cat left. The partisans were starved, angry. They took my cow, and I followed them…I walked about seven miles. I begged them to give it back. I left three hungry children at home by the stove. “Go back, woman!” they threatened. “Or else we’ll shoot you.”
Try finding a good man during the war…
People turned against each other. The children of the kulaks*11 came back from exile. Their parents had been killed, and they served the German forces.
They took their revenge. One of them shot an old teacher in his cottage. Our neighbor. This neighbor had once denounced his father and had taken part in dispossessing him. He was a fervent Communist.
At first the Germans disbanded the kolkhozes and gave people the land. People breathed more freely after Stalin. We paid quitrent…Paid it accurately…And then they began to burn us. Us and our houses. They drove the livestock away and burned the people…
Aie, daughter dear, I’m afraid of words. Words are scary…I saved myself by doing good, I didn’t wish evil on anyone. I pitied them all…
—
—I went with the army as far as Berlin…
I came back to my village with two Medals of Honor and some decorations. I spent three days there, and on the fourth my mother got me up early, while everybody was asleep: “Daughter dear, I’ve prepared a bundle for you. Go away…Go away…You have two younger sisters growing up. Who will marry them? Everybody knows you spent four years at the front, with men…”
Don’t touch my soul. Write, as the others do, about my decorations…
—
—War is war. It’s not some kind of theater…
They had our unit form up in a clearing; we stood in a ring. In the middle were Misha K. and Kolya M.—our boys. Misha was a brave scout, he played the accordion. And nobody sang better than Kolya…
They spent a long time reading the sentence: in such-and-such village they had demanded two bottles of moonshine, and at night…raped their host’s two
daughters…And in such-and-such village they robbed a peasant of an overcoat and a sewing machine…which they went and exchanged for drink at the neighbors’…
They were sentenced to be shot…The sentence was final and without appeal.
Who will do the shooting? The unit is silent…Who? We’re silent…The commander himself carried out the sentence…
—
—I was a machine gunner. I killed so many…
For a long time after the war I was afraid to have children. I gave birth to a child when I calmed down. Seven years later…
But I still haven’t forgiven anything. And I won’t…I was glad when I saw German prisoners. I was glad that they were pitiful to look at: footwraps on their feet instead of boots, footwraps on their heads…They were led through the villages and they asked, “Mother, give brot…Brot…” I was astonished that peasants came out of their cottages and gave them—one a piece of bread, another a potato…Boys ran after the column and threw stones…But the women wept…
It seems to me that I’ve lived two lives: one a man’s, the other a woman’s…
—
—After the war…Human life was worthless. I’ll give you an example…I’m riding on a bus after work; suddenly there’s shouting: “Stop thief! Stop thief! My purse…” The bus stops…A crowd forms at once. A young officer takes a boy outside, puts his arm on his knee and—whack!—breaks it in two. Jumps back on the bus…And we go on…Nobody defended the boy, nobody called a policeman.
A doctor. The officer had his whole chest covered with combat decorations…I was getting off at my stop, he hopped down and gave me his hand: “Allow me, Miss…” Such a gallant one…
I’ve just remembered it…At the time we were all still people of the war, we lived by the laws of wartime. Are they human at all?
—
—The Red Army came back…
We were allowed to dig up the graves, to search for where our families had
been shot. By an old custom you have to wear white next to death—a white kerchief, a white shirt. I’ll remember it to my last breath! People went with white embroidered towels…Dressed all in white…Where did they get it?
We dug…Whatever we found and recognized we took. One brought an arm in a wheelbarrow, another a head in a cart…A man doesn’t stay whole in the ground for long, they were all mixed up together. With clay, with sand.
I didn’t find my sister, but I thought that a scrap of a dress was hers, it looked familiar…Grandfather also said, “Take it, there’ll be something to bury.” We put this piece of a dress into a little coffin…
We got a notice that my father was “missing in action.” Others got something for those who had been killed, but my mother and I got a scare in the village council: “You’re not entitled to any aid. It may be he’s living in clover with some German Frau. An enemy of the people.”
I began to look for my father under Khrushchev.*12 Forty years later, under Gorbachev, I received an answer: “Not listed in the records…” But his regimental comrade wrote to me and I found out that my father had died a hero. He had thrown himself with a grenade under a tank at Mogilev*13….
It’s a pity my mother didn’t live to get this news. She died branded as the wife of an enemy of the people. A traitor. There were many like her. They didn’t live to learn the truth. I went to mother’s grave with this letter. Read it…
—
—Many of us believed…
We thought that after the war everything would change…Stalin would trust his people. But the war was not yet over, and the troop trains were already going to Magadan.*14 Troop trains with the victors…Those who had been captured, those who had survived the German camps, those whom the Germans had taken along to work for them—all those who had seen Europe—were arrested. Those who could tell how people there lived. Without Communists. What kind of houses they had and what kind of roads. And that there were no kolkhozes…
After the Victory everybody became silent. Silent and afraid, as before the war…
—
—I’m a history teacher…Within my memory the history textbook has been rewritten three times. I taught children with three different textbooks…
Ask us while we’re alive. Don’t rewrite afterward without us. Ask…
Do you know how hard it is to kill a human being? I worked in the underground. After six months I was sent on a mission—to take a job as a waitress in a German officers’ mess…I was young, beautiful…They hired me. I was supposed to put poison into the soup cauldron and leave for the partisans the same day. I had already grown used to them; they were the enemy, but I saw them every day, they said, “Danke schön…Danke schön…” It was hard…To kill is hard…To kill is more terrible than to die…
I’ve taught history all my life…And I never knew how to tell about that…In what words…
—
I HAD MY OWN war…I went a long way together with my heroines. Just like them, for a long time I did not believe that our Victory had two faces—one beautiful and the other terrible, all scars—unbearable to look at. “In hand-to-hand combat, when you kill a man, you look him in the eye. It’s not like throwing bombs or shooting from a trench,” they told me.
Listening to how a person killed or died is the same—you look him in the eye…
*1 Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) was one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century. The epigraph comes from “Lines on the Unknown Soldier” (1937–1938). Mandelstam died in transit to one of Stalin’s hard-labor camps.
*2 A participant in a voluntary resistance movement fighting a guerrilla war against the Germans during World War II.
*3 The novel I Am from a Burning Village (also known in English as Out of the Fire), by the Belorussian writers Ales Adamovich (1927–1994), Yanka Bryl (1917–2006), and Vladimir Kolesnik (1922–1994), chronicles the Nazi destruction of Belorussian villages during World War II. Adamovich was a novelist, critic, and philosopher who had fought as a partisan in 1942–1943 and became a forceful antiwar activist.
*4 Gulag is the Russian acronym for “Main Administration of Camps,” i.e., the system of “corrective”
forced labor camps instituted in the Soviet Union beginning in 1918.
*5 In Soviet legal terminology the phrase “without the right of correspondence” usually meant the prisoner had been executed.
*6 Golodomor (“holodomor” in Ukrainian) means “death by hunger.” The term refers to the deliberately created famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, which cost many millions of lives.
*7 The Soviet acronym for “collective farm.”
*8 Gorbachev’s perestroika: The “restructuring” begun in 1986 under Mikhail Gorbachev (1933–), the last General Secretary of the Communist Party and head of state until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
*9 The German novelist Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) is best known for his novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), about the harsh experiences of German soldiers during World War I. His works were banned and publicly burned by the Nazis in 1933.
*10 German for “police,” but the term was also applied to Russian collaborators.
*11 Originally a term for wealthy independent peasant farmers; under the Soviets it became a derogatory label for any peasants who resisted the forced collectivization of agriculture. Kulaks were arrested and either shot or sent to hard labor in Siberia.
*12 Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), who became First Secretary of the Communist Party in 1953, at Stalin’s death, and later served as premier, instituted the process of “de-Stalinization” of the Soviet Union, beginning with the 20th Party Congress in 1956.
*13 Mogilev, an old city in Belorussia, was taken by the Nazis in 1941 and retaken by the Soviets in 1944. Its large Jewish population was exterminated
*14 A city and territory in the far east of Russia, which became the center for a vast labor-camp system established by Stalin in 1932.
An old three-story house on the outskirts of Minsk, one of those built hastily just after the war and, as it then seemed, not meant to last, now cozily overgrown with old jasmine bushes. With it began a search that went on for seven years, seven extraordinary and tormenting years, during which I was to discover for myself the world of war, a world the meaning of which we cannot fully fathom. I would experience pain, hatred, temptation. Tenderness and perplexity…I would try to understand what distinguishes death from murder and where the boundary is between the human and the inhuman. How does a human being remain alone with the insane thought that he or she might kill another human being? Is even obliged to? And I would discover that in war there is, apart from death, a multitude of other things; there is everything that is in our ordinary life. War is also life. I would run into countless human truths. Mysteries. I would ponder questions the existence of which I had never suspected. For instance, why is it that we are not surprised at evil, why this absence in us of surprise in the face of evil?
A road and many roads…Dozens of trips all over the country, hundreds of recorded cassettes, thousands of yards of tape. Five hundred meetings, after which I stopped counting; faces left my memory, only voices remained. A chorus resounds in my memory. An enormous chorus; sometimes the words almost cannot be heard, only the weeping. I confess: I did not always believe that I was strong enough for this path, that I could make it. Could reach the end. There were moments of doubt and fear, when I wanted to stop or step aside, but I no longer could. I fell captive to evil, I looked into the abyss in order to understand something. Now I seem to have acquired some knowledge, but there are still more questions, and fewer answers.
But then, at the very beginning of the path, I had no suspicion of that…
What led me to this house was a short article in the local newspaper about a
farewell party given at the Udarnik automobile factory in Minsk for the senior accountant Maria Ivanovna Morozova, who was retiring. During the war, the article said, she had been a sniper, had eleven combat decorations, and her total as a sniper was seventy-five killings. It was hard to bring together mentally this woman’s wartime profession with her peacetime occupation. With the routine newspaper photograph. With all these tokens of the ordinary.
—
…A small woman with a long braid wound in a girlish crown around her head was sitting in a big armchair, covering her face with her hands.
“No, no, I won’t. Go back there again? I can’t…To this day I can’t watch war movies. I was very young then. I dreamed and grew, grew and dreamed. And then
—the war. I even feel sorry for you…I know what I’m talking about…Do you really want to know that? I ask you like a daughter…”
Of course she was surprised.
“But why me? You should talk to my husband, he likes to remember…The names of the commanders, the generals, the numbers of units—he remembers everything. I don’t. I only remember what happened to me. My own war. There were lots of people around, but you were always alone, because a human being is always alone in the face of death. I remember the terrifying solitude.”
She asked me to take the tape recorder away.
“I need your eyes in order to tell about it, and that will hinder me.”
But a few minutes later she forgot about it…
Maria Ivanovna Morozova (Ivanushkina)
CORPORAL, SNIPER
This will be a simple story…The story of an ordinary Russian girl, of whom there were many then…
The place where my native village, Diakovskoe, stood is now the Proletarian District of Moscow. When the war began, I was not quite eighteen. Long, long braids, down to my knees…Nobody believed the war would last, everybody expected it to end any moment. We would drive out the enemy. I worked on a kolkhoz, then finished accounting school and began to work. The war went on…
My girlfriends…They tell me: “We should go to the front.” It was already in the air. We all signed up and took classes at the local recruitment office. Maybe some did it just to keep one another company, I don’t know. They taught us to shoot a combat rifle, to throw hand grenades. At first…I’ll confess, I was afraid to hold a rifle, it was unpleasant. I couldn’t imagine that I’d go and kill somebody, I just wanted to go to the front. We had forty people in our group. Four girls from our village, so we were all friends; five from our neighbors’; in short—some from each village. All of them girls…The men had all gone to the war already, the ones who could. Sometimes a messenger came in the middle of the night, gave them two hours to get ready, and they’d be carted off. They could even be taken right from the fields. (Silence.) I don’t remember now—whether we had dances; if we did, the girls danced with girls, there were no boys left. Our villages became quiet.
Soon an appeal came from the central committee of Komsomol*1 for the young people to go and defend the Motherland, since the Germans were already near Moscow. Hitler take Moscow? We won’t allow it! I wasn’t the only one…All our girls expressed the wish to go to the front. My father was already fighting.
We thought we were the only ones like that…Special ones…But we came to the recruitment office and there were lots of girls there. I just gasped! My heart was on fire, so intensely. The selection was very strict. First of all, of course, you had to have robust health. I was afraid they wouldn’t take me, because as a child I was often sick, and my frame was weak, as my mother used to say. Other children insulted me because of it when I was little. And then, if there were no other children in a household except the girl who wanted to go to the front, they also refused: a mother should not be left by herself. Ah, our darling mothers! Their tears never dried…They scolded us, they begged…But in our family there were two sisters and two brothers left—true, they were all much younger than me, but it counted anyway. There was one more thing: everybody from our kolkhoz was gone, there was nobody to work in the fields, and the chairman didn’t want to let us go. In short, they refused us. We went to the district committee of Komsomol, and there—refusal. Then we went as a delegation from our district to the regional Komsomol. There was great inspiration in all of us; our hearts were on fire. Again we were sent home. We decided, since we were in Moscow, to go to the central committee of Komsomol, to the top, to the first secretary. To carry through to the end…Who would be our spokesman? Who was brave enough? We thought we would surely be the only ones there, but it was impossible even to get into the corridor, let alone to reach the secretary. There were young people from all over
